David Watkin (cinematographer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the historian see, see David Watkin (historian).

David Watkin (born March 23, 1925 in Margate, England) is an influential British cinematographer who was among the first directors of photography to experiment heavily with the usage of bounce light as a soft light source. He has worked with such noted directors as Richard Lester, Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Mike Nichols, Ken Russell, Franco Zeffirelli, Sidney Lumet, and Sydney Pollack.

In 1985, Watkin won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on Out of Africa. Most recently, he was given lifetime achievement awards in 2004 by both the British Society of Cinematographers and the cinematographic-centric Camerimage Film Festival in Łódź, Poland.

Watkin was born in Margate on March 23, 1925, the fourth and youngest son of a Catholic solicitor father and homemaker mother, and grew up within a well-to-do upper-middle class household. He gained an early yen for European classical music, which was left to be satisfied only as a passive listener when his father rejected his request for a piano and lessons; Watkin always contends that he would rather have been a professional musician than a cinematographer.

After a brief stint in the Army during World War II, Watkin started work at the Southern Railway Film Unit in 1948 as a camera assistant. After the unit was absorbed into British Transport Films in 1950, he eventually climbed the ranks up to director of photography at BTF before going off to work freelance in commercials in around 1960. It was on a commercial shoot that he met Richard Lester, who hired him for his feature film, The Knack...and How to Get It (1965). The two subsequently worked together on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed-Sitting Room, The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, Robin and Marian, and Cuba.

He is noted for his very casual approach; when asked when he first developed a passion for photography, he answered that he hadn't as of yet (his main passions being classical music and books). He also has a rather famous habit of sleeping on-set in between lighting setups, because "it's the only thing you can do on-set which doesn't make you more tired". This habit was humorously referenced in Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), which he shot, where he has a brief cameo towards the beginning as a sleeping judge. In the case of the film of Marat/Sade (1967), problems of a tight shooting schedule and restricted set space were innovatively resolved through the usage of one single lighting set-up for the entirety of the film - a translucent wall lit by twenty-six 10 kW lamps as the sole source of light.

Watkin also conceived of the idea for a new light which would tackle the problem of light falloff during night shoots. Because of the inverse square law, light from even moderately strong sources starts to fall off fairly quickly as the subject walks away from the light source. Therefore films shooting at night had the problem of trying to hide light sources in places which would be out of shot but maintain a fairly constant level of illumination over any amount of distance (and thus not indicate a large lamp as a light source). His solution was to build a large array of tightly spaced Fay lights in a 14x14 square (196 lights total), which was then elevated 150 feet high on a cherry picker placed roughly a quarter of a mile away. Because of the large distance between the light and the actors and the high luminescence of this light array, the actors could walk across long distances without the intensity of the light hitting them seeming to vary. Subsequently, the array was named the "Wendy-light" in honor of Watkin, whose "camp name" is Wendy.

His autobiography, Why Is There Only One Word for Thesaurus?, was first published in 1998 and is currently being prepared for a revised second edition.

[edit] Selected filmography

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../d/a/v/David_Watkin_%28cinematographer%29_dcfb.html"
In other languages